People do have an expiration date. In 1800 it was about 40 years. In 1900 it was about 47 years. In 1960 it was about 70 years. In 2012 it was about 77 years. These are average ages for people in the U.S. In the future people will be healthy longer meaning that the old retirement age of 65 will no longer be the standard to collect social security. I'm 66 and live around a lot of old people here in Arizona and you might be surprised how healthy and active many of them are.

Free Enterprise: A million salesmen pushing the “too much”. Socialism: A million ration clerks dividing up the “too little”

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.George Orwell

I have mentioned this many times before here and elsewhere. We are just lucky that we have not been hit with another large piece of space rock. We have the technology to get better at detection and avoidance and we should spend the money on it. Anyway, the technology benefits will be huge. Look the Apollo Program was- economists say that was a 26:1 dollar for dollar gain.

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Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.

I have mentioned this many times before here and elsewhere. We are just lucky that we have not been hit with another large piece of space rock. We have the technology to get better at detection and avoidance and we should spend the money on it. Anyway, the technology benefits will be huge. Look the Apollo Program was- economists say that was a 26:1 dollar for dollar gain.

__________________________

Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.

Naw, unless it's large enough to split the earch into pieces the earth is perfectly well prepared. It humans who aren't,